The Beach Dog Latitudes

About the Book

Composed of two novellas and a narrative "bridge" spanning the 20 years time elapsed between them, The Beach Dog Latitudes tells the story of a brief love affair with a persistent aftermath, while taking sidelong looks at sailing, bureaucracy, dogs, and digestion, among other daily phenomena. The principals--ever willing and ever frustrated in the attempt to know one another in anything but the biblical or social sense--include a lesbian baseball junkie, a redneck fisherman, a wandering soldier, and several famous dead writers--in spirit if not word.

The common task and common dread of this cast is to face the question: What do we know? What do we know that we can really hit with a hammer, about ourselves, those others out there, and these others in here? Starting from "an initiatory narrative" about a broken car and a cruise on a boat called Gypsy that turns to discovery, intimacy, and tragedy, the novel moves out to the perimeter of its home range to look back in on itself and examine the aftermath of events from other perspectives. A friend of Gypsy's once intimate and long estranged crew takes up "terminal residence" in a misplaced valley in the Sierra Madre, the better to see his story. The devout cynic Jamie disappears, the better to be her own epitaph, leaving her one-time lover and lifelong voice of reason to sift the evidence and noodle out where the years went, who learned anything worth remembering, and what to do with all the paperwork left behind.

Beth embarks on "an interrogative meditation" rendered in a series of episodes played out in the aggressively fragrant streets of a Mexican beach town, to which the investigator retreats because it is beside the ocean and far away, the better to think. She is forced by circumstances to read her own testimony and conduct her own cross-examination. A job which brings her to the brink of common sense--if that's why she's really there.

Questions lie at the heart of matters in the latitudes where escapees and refugees must address specters in short pants, while men with machine guns guard the corners from tourists armed with credit cards and the camouflage of broad-brimmed hats.

It is a place where answers are scarce and the dogs have no collars. The prudent traveler here carries a handbook of local terms, folk medicine, and useful nots.

About the Author

W.G. Fraser was born and raised in Connecticut. A thankful survivor of various jobs in business and government, he now lives in Colorado, where he writes, does home renovations, teaches English, and spends as much time fishing as life allows.